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Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
toward the world and has a trait, thereby, to act accordingly. Criticality requires
that one be moved to
do
something (Burbules and Berk 1999, 52). While skills
and dispositions are crucial for critical thinking, they are not sufficient unless
a person is in her- or himself critical and unless she or he is disposed to act in
a critical vein. To adapt a famous line from Kant: criticality without critical
thinking skills is empty; critical thinking without action is myopic.
An example of “criticality”
The concept of criticality—as a composite of critical thinking, critical reflec-
tion, and critical action—has been made concrete by the use of a famous
photograph as a frontispiece to Barnett’s book
Higher Education: A Critical
Business
(1997). The photograph depicts a student in front of a line of tanks in
Tiananmen Square in 1989. Most people have seen this photograph; indeed, it
is one of the defining photographs of the latter part of the twentieth century.
How does the photograph demonstrate critical thinking as “criticality”?
This photograph is intended to imply that higher education should be (if not
always in practice) an educational process involving a composite of
thinking,
being-in-the-world,
and
action
. Critical thinking, in the established cognitive
sense proposed by philosophers such as Ennis, Siegel, Lipman, McPeck, and
others, is an important perspective, but by itself inadequate as a way of cap-
turing what higher education can be
at its best.
Higher education can, there-
fore, potentially do much more than teach students how to demonstrate (for
example) critical thinking as analytic skills and judgments. It can also prompt
students to understand themselves, to have a critical orientation to the world,
and to demonstrate an active sociopolitical stance toward established norms or
practices with which they are confronted. This, it is argued, is more than what
is offered by the critical thinking movement in relation to skills in critical
thinking; it is tantamount to the development of critical
beings.
This is a sense of “critical thinking” that extends beyond the individual and his
or her cognitive states and dispositions to the individual’s participation in soci-
ety as a critically engaged citizen in the world. Note that it also includes a
moral
and
ethical
dimension to critical thinking. After all, critical thinkers do more
than reason; they also
act ethically
on the basis of their reasoned judgments.
In this argument for the criticality dimension,
critical reasoning, critical reflec-
tion
, and
critical action
could be thought of as three interlocking circles in the
form of a Venn diagram (see figure 0.2). It is important, according to Barnett,
that they be regarded as interlocking—but not as entirely congruent with each
other; otherwise, the space for each of them to work (including critical think-
ing in the cognitive sense) would be lost.
The respective concerns of educational philosophers and higher education
scholars in relation to the topic of critical thinking are then quite different.
The work of Ennis, Paul, McPeck, and others aims to identify the philosophical
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